“The question is, who’s going to pay for the tariffs?” Powell said in response to a question during his testimony before the Senate Banking Committee. “How much of it does show up in inflation. And honestly, it’s very hard to predict that in advance.”
CMS projects national healthcare spending to reach $5.6 trillion this year amid continued strong healthcare utilization growth, and then climb to $8.6 trillion by 2033.
The findings are from the agency’s analysis released June 25 and will also appear in the policy journal Health Affairs next month.
Five things to know:
1. National health spending is projected to have grown 8.2% in 2024, according to CMS. This includes Medicare expenditures, which were expected to have grown 8.3% in 2024, while Medicaid spending growth was projected to have grown 6.2%, compared with 7.9% in 2023.
2. National health spending is projected to increase 7.1% in 2025, according to CMS, while national health spending is expected to grow 5.4% in 2026 and 5.7% in 2027.
CMS said the increases are partly because of a decrease in the share of the population with health insurance related to the expiration of temporarily enhanced ACA premium tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 and due to an anticipated slowdown in utilization growth.
3. From 2024 to 2033, CMS projects national health spending to grow by an average of 5.8% per year, outpacing the 4.3% average annual growth for GDP for that period.
4. CMS expects the health share of GDP to reach 20.3% by 2033 (up from 17.6% in 2023).
5. “Although the projections presented here reflect current law, future legislative and regulatory health policy changes could have a significant impact on the projections of health coverage, health spending trends, and related cost-sharing requirements, and they thus could ultimately affect the health share of GDP by 2033,” CMS concluded.
Read more about the study here.
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/us-to-spend-8-6-trillion-on-healthcare-by-2033-cms/
Microsoft has been hit with a lawsuit by a group of authors who claim the company used their books without permission to train its Megatron artificial intelligence model.
Kai Bird, Jia Tolentino, Daniel Okrent and several others alleged that Microsoft used pirated digital versions of their books to teach its AI to respond to human prompts. Their lawsuit, filed in New York federal court on Tuesday, is one of several high-stakes cases brought by authors, news outlets and other copyright holders against tech companies including Meta Platforms, Anthropic and Microsoft-backed OpenAI over alleged misuse of their material in AI training.
The complaint against Microsoft came a day after a California federal judge ruled that Anthropic made fair use under U.S. copyright law of authors' material to train its AI systems but may still be liable for pirating their books. It was the first U.S. decision on the legality of using copyrighted materials without permission for generative AI training.
Spokespeople for Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit. An attorney for the authors declined to comment.
The writers alleged in the complaint that Microsoft used a collection of nearly 200,000 pirated books to train Megatron, an algorithm that gives text responses to user prompts. The complaint said Microsoft used the pirated dataset to create a "computer model that is not only built on the work of thousands of creators and authors, but also built to generate a wide range of expression that mimics the syntax, voice, and themes of the copyrighted works on which it was trained."
Tech companies have argued that they make fair use of copyrighted material to create new, transformative content, and that being forced to pay copyright holders for their work could hamstring the burgeoning AI industry.
The authors requested a court order blocking Microsoft's infringement and statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each work that Microsoft allegedly misused.
One of the new working groups will consider whether hepatitis B vaccines are given too early, said Martin Kulldorff, who took the helm of the agency’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices after it was revamped by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Infants currently get it within 24 hours of birth, according to the CDC.
Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo is still weighing whether to run as an independent for New York City mayor in the general election — after his stunning loss to socialist Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic primary.
The major upset put the Democratic Party establishment on high alert — but Cuomo may not be out of the race just yet, telling The Post on Wednesday that he was waiting to make a final decision about whether to try his luck as an independent in the general election.
His campaign said last month that he would run on the independent “Fight and Deliver” ballot line in November regardless of the June 24 primary’s outcome — which saw the thrice-elected Dem trail the 33-year-old Queens assemblyman by a near-insurmountable 7 points.
“I’m looking at the numbers from last night. I want to get an idea of what the general election looks like and what landscape looks like, and what the issues are, and then make the decision,” he said outside of his home in Midtown East.
“It’s one step at a time, and we haven’t even gotten all the numbers from last night,” Cuomo said.
The thrice-elected Democrat insisted that his 7 points loss in the first-choice ranking of the primary — by about 70,000 votes — was not reflective of the Big Apple electorate overall.
“It’s 1.4 percent of the registered voters in New York. That’s why these Democratic primaries are such a small sliver of overall voters. We have 5 million voters. We have 1 million who voted in the primary election overall,” he argued.
Cuomo said he believes the upcoming general election campaign will spark discussion over “a different set of issues” than those that rose to the forefront in the heated primary.
“[The issues] can’t just be something that sounds good in a campaign. It has to be something that the person knows how to implement and actually works,” he added in a veiled swipe at Mamdani, who has been criticized for proposing a lofty list of free programs.Cuomo’s campaign said last month that he would run on the independent ballot in the November race regardless of the June primary outcome to appeal to a wider voting bloc of “disillusioned Democrats, as well as to independents and Republicans.”
He has qualified to run on the independent “Fight and Deliver” ticket on the general election ballot.
Cuomo would join a crowded field that includes Mamdani and longtime Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa, who will appear on the ballot again after scrounging up just 28% of the vote in 2021.
Mayor Eric Adams, who opted to forgo the Democratic primary to run for re-election as an independent, would be Cuomo’s largest hurdle to Gracie Mansion as they share many of the same core values.
Attorney Jim Walden is also running as an independent candidate.
Adams has criticized Cuomo’s decision to challenge him as an independent.
In a “Fox & Friends” appearance Wednesday morning, the mayor said: “Cuomo should realize that ‘time has moved on'” from him — as he compared Mamdani’s campaign promises to those of a “snake oil salesman.”
“Cuomo can’t come out on weekends, go to a black church, eat some fried chicken, and all of a sudden say that ‘I have the black vote,’ ‘I have the working-class people vote’ — it’s is just not the reality,” Adams said.
“People know if you want the job. He didn’t want the job.”
Cuomo conceded the mayoral Democratic primary to Mamdani after first-choice results in the city’s ranking system showed the two-term state lawmaker notching a significant lead.
With over 96% of Democratic primary votes counted by Wednesday morning, Mamdani held a commanding 43.5% lead over Cuomo’s 36.4% — or just over 70,000 votes.
Trailing in third behind them was city Comptroller Brad Lander with 11.3%.
More than 993,500 New Yorkers cast their vote in the mayoral primary, according to the latest board tally.
All of the ranked-choice voting results are expected to be counted by July 1.
Democratic sources said Mamdani and his campaign outhustled Cuomo in the final weeks ahead of the primary, despite $25 million funneled into a pro-Cuomo Fix The City super PAC and dozens of labor unions supporting him.
Biogen has pointed to an early readout from a small phase 1 trial as evidence that its antisense oligonucleotide salanersen could help children with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) who are still struggling to sit independently despite having received Novartis’ Zolgensma.
The phase 1 study was split into two parts: a healthy adult volunteer cohort and 24 children aged five months to 12 years with SMA who had previously received the gene therapy Zolgensma and were administered either 40 mg or 80 mg salanersen once a year. Biogen conducted an interim analysis of data from the latter cohort to help decide whether to take salanersen forward into registrational studies.
Of the children in the second part of the trial who had elevated baseline concentrations of neurofilament light chain (NfL)—a biomarker of neurodegeneration—salanersen was tied to a mean reduction in NfL of 70% at six months. This reduction was sustained for a year, Biogen explained in a June 25 release.
The pharma drilled down further into the interim data to identify eight patients aged between two and 12 years who received 40 mg of salandnersen and had at least a one-year follow-up by the time of the analysis. Half of this subgroup achieved motor function milestones that they had previously not achieved despite receiving Zolgensma, according to Biogen. These included walking, crawling, standing or sitting.
“To see a child dosed with gene therapy at one year of age and still unable to sit without support at age five then gain the ability to sit independently just three months after initiating salanersen—that is unexpected,” Valeria Sansone, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Neurology at the University of Milan and a principal investigator for the trial, said in the release.
Sansone noted that today’s data come from “a relatively small cohort,” and a larger trial is still needed to “further understand the effects that salanersen can have in both previously treated and treatment-naïve individuals.”
Assessing the safety data across the treated children, Biogen concluded that salanersen had a “generally well-tolerated safety profile” at both the 40 mg and 80 mg doses. Most adverse events were mild to moderate in severity, with no serious adverse events linked to the treatment itself. The most common side effects were fever (affecting 40% of patients) and upper respiratory tract infection (affecting 29%).
Salanersen, which was licensed from Ionis Pharmaceuticals, has the same mechanism of action as Biogen’s approved blockbuster SMA antisense oligonucleotide therapy Spinraza but the pharma is aiming for greater potency and once-yearly dosing.
Should salanersen make it to market for SMA, it will enter a space already filled not only by Zolgensma and Spinraza, but Roche’s survival motor neuron-2 splicing modifier Evrysdi. Biogen highlighted the fact that it is the only biopharma with both an approved SMA therapy and a potential follow-up in the clinic.
Based on today’s data, Biogen said it is engaging with global regulators about the design of a phase 3 trial for salanersen.
“Despite the remarkable therapeutic advancements in the field of SMA over the past decade, there remains critical unmet needs,” Biogen’s head of neuromuscular development Stephanie Fradette said in the release. “We are encouraged by the available data and eager to move salanersen into the next stage of development as quickly as possible.”
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced on Wednesday that he plans to cut a wealth of U.S. funding to Gavi, an international vaccine alliance that seeks to immunize the world’s poorest communities.
During a video message at the Gavi fundraising event in Brussels, Kennedy announced plans to cut financial ties to the organization until it had “re-earned the public trust,” according to Politico. The U.S. will continue a few key grant programs for medications to treat HIV and tuberculosis, and deliver food aid to countries in turmoil.
“When the science was inconvenient, Gavi ignored the science,” he said. “I call on Gavi today to re-earn the public trust and to justify the $8 billion that America has provided in funding since 2001. And I’ll tell you how to start taking vaccine safety seriously: Consider the best science available, even when the science contradicts established paradigms. Until that happens, the United States won’t contribute more to Gavi.”
While the U.S. has been the second-leading government donor to Gavi behind the United Kingdom, providing it with up to $300 million annually in the past, Kennedy expressed concern that the organization had made questionable recommendations about COVID-19 vaccines and neglected vaccine safety. He raised particular concerns about the diphtheria-tetanus-whole cell pertussis vaccine, which was approved without undergoing a placebo-controlled trial, a clinical study viewed as the most scientifically rigorous way to determine whether a vaccine is both safe and effective.
Kennedy announced in April that under his tenure, all new vaccines would undergo safety testing in placebo-controlled trials before licensure, “a radical departure from past practices.”
The Trump administration first made moves to disassociate itself from Gavi earlier this year, when the White House announced plans to overhaul the U.S. Agency for International Development due to accusations of systemic fraud and corruption. Gavi was one of the biggest recipients of USAID funds.
Kennedy has scrutinized Gavi over its ties to groups such as the World Health Organization. After conducting a two-year investigation on the panemic, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released a 520-page report last December that accused the WHO of downplaying credible evidence COVID-19 leaked from a Chinese research lab in Wuhan “because it caved to pressure from the Chinese Communist Party and placed China’s political interests ahead of its international duties.”
Gavi also holds close ties to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has additionally been scrutinized for its ties to China amid the pandemic, including sending over $20 million to the country in 2023, and steering millions toward the country’s National Health Commission, which crafts Beijing’s health-related policies. The Gates Foundation is the largest private donor to Gavi, contributing $7.7 billion to the group over the last 25 years, and announced Tuesday that it will commit $1.6 billion over the next five years to support the vaccine group.
One of Kennedy’s primary grievances about Gavi lies in the instrumental role it played in spurring mass distribution of the COVID-19 vaccines, including the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines, which the HHS secretary has criticized due partly to concerns they placed recipients at a higher risk of myocarditis.
The Children’s Health Defense Group, an organization Kennedy led for over a decade before stepping aside in 2023, has accused Gavi of being “one of the most prolific purveyors of pro-vaccine propaganda in the world.”
Gavi and other Big Pharma-backed organizations are “grappling with the fact that parents around the globe are waking up to the serious risks posed by vaccines, including autism, and that increasing numbers of people aren’t buying what they’re selling,” CHD Vice President Laura Bono said last year.
Kennedy’s move to cut ties with Gavi until he says it “re-earns” public trust comes as confidence in health institutions and vaccines has fallen to record lows, particularly since the pandemic.
While a clear majority of people still believe it is important for children to be vaccinated, the number has fallen by 25% since 2001.
Kennedy has said he will address the issue by implementing “radical transparency” at HHS.
“The reason people don’t trust the public health agencies is because they haven’t been trustworthy,” Kennedy said.
